Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Kestrel Nest Box Update

The American kestrel prefers open areas with short ground vegetation such as grasslands, meadows, fields, and parks. In urbanized areas, they might be seen perched on a pole or wire overlooking open space below them. They feed primarily on small animals, including grasshoppers, mice voles, dragonflies, and small lizards. If you have suitable habitat and would like to install a kestrel nest box, click here for our plans. We'd love to hear from anyone who has installed one of our boxes, so shoot me an email and let me know: ries93@gmail.com.

Last year we began a pilot project to install kestrel nest boxes along rural gravel roads. The American kestrel (Falco sparverius) is a small falcon that is in decline throughout parts of its range. There are a number of theories about the kestrel's decline: HawkWatch International's list of factors includes development and reforestation of preferred habitats, poisoning, and the West Nile virus. We've focused on the loss of grassland in Iowa, where farms have grown larger, woodlots, fencerows, and fallow land have shrunk, and small grains and hayland have been replaced with row-cropped soybeans and corn. The Iowa DNR states:

"Between 1990 and 2010, Iowa lost 2,615 square miles of potential pheasant habitat. This habitat was a mix of small grains, hay land, and Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres. To put this loss in perspective, 2,615 square miles is a strip of habitat 9 miles wide that would stretch from Omaha to Davenport!" [2012 Iowa Roadside Survey]

So why use ditches? Bob looks at the ditches and shoulders of rural roads and major highways as voleways. I don't tend to think of farmland as heavily developed, myself - it's all green, right? - but mile after mile of row-cropped corn and soybeans is not a natural environment. As grassland and pothole prairie are converted into farmland, animals and birds are forced into ditches. Water, rodents, insects, and plant life attract a wide variety of larger animals, including deer, rabbits, woodchucks, gophers, mink, muskrats, badgers, fox, raccoon, skunks, snakes, frogs, red-tailed hawks, harriers, kestrels, sparrows, mourning doves, gold finches, bobolinks, and pheasants.

A kestrel in one of our nest boxes. Photocredit Nora Hensley.

A little back-of-the-envelope calculation. Iowa contains a total of 36,016,640 acres. Over 90%, or 32,414,976 acres, is under till. So how much of what's left is ditch? That's a hard question. The DOT manages about 175,000 acres along interstate and state highways, but that figure doesn't cover county, city, and town roads. When those are added in, the total jumps up to about 1.6 million acres, or 44% of the remaining 3.6 million acres left. Although broken and fragmented, that is a lot of potential habitat with which to create a kestrel habitat.

Last fall, we installed six nest boxes along 310th street in rural Winneshiek County [click here for google map]. We returned this spring to find that two of them were destroyed. One had tipped over and the other had been vandalized. However, four were still standing and three contained kestrels! We clearly needed to add cement to the base of the poles to keep them stabilized, but other than that, the plan worked!

Bob enlisted the help of David Lynch and his wife Anne to add concrete to the base of the poles and we returned a week or so later to band kestrels. Unfortunately, we weren't able to band - in two of the three nests, the babies were too young, and they were almost on the wing in nest #3. Still, our pilot project proved that rural ditches can provide habitat for nesting kestrels. 75% of the nest boxes left standing in the spring produced kestrels, and we can avoid tipping by stabilizing the box poles with cement. A big thanks to county engineer Lee Bjerke for giving us permission to install the boxes in Winneshiek county's right-of-way.

We will be looking to expand this program in the coming year, and we would love to hear from anyone who downloaded plans and built one of our kestrel boxes. Shoot me an email at ries93@gmail.com.

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Established in 1988, the non-profit Raptor Resource Project specializes in the preservation of falcons, eagles, ospreys, hawks, and owls. We create, improve, and directly maintain nests and nest sites, provide training in nest site creation and management, and develop innovations in nest site management and viewing that bring people closer to the natural world. Our mission is to preserve and strengthen raptor populations, expand participation in raptor preservation, and help foster the next generation of preservationists.